environment: assholes denialists idiots media irresponsibility morons
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 21: Red Scare Edition
Never heard of Dennis Byrne before, but he’s left a big floater in the Chicago Tribune’s bowl:
As surely as stink follows a garbage truck, the deadly national heat wave brought forth predictable and terrifying scenarios from global warming alarmists.
Triumphantly, the alarmists proclaimed that global warming (or climate change, or extreme weather, or whatever is their latest rendition of Earth’s frightful fate) was back high on the list of everyone’s worst fears.
Told-ya-sos flowed. Denunciations of global warming “skeptics” and “deniers” were renewed. The threadbare mantra — “the science is in, the debate is over” — was re-energized.
Reliably, a Washington Post story about Colorado’s destructive wildfires waved away fact with speculation: “Lightning and suspected arson ignited them four weeks ago, but scientists and federal officials say the table was set by a culprit that will probably contribute to bigger and more frequent wildfires for years to come: climate change.”
And thus the unconscionable corruption of real science by global warming propagandists continues unabated. It’s unconscionable because they are using the loss of life and destruction of property as a prop to get you to believe that the worst is yet to come. It’s unconscionable because making such predictions is not what real science does. For all the condemnation about “anti-science deniers” on the right, the truth is that actual anti-science folks are the ones on the left using bad science to try to scare the bejabbers out of us.
(facepalm). Sent July 10:
One of the cardinal principles of science is that good theories provide verifiable predictions.
Several decades ago, climatologists began predicting what would happen to Earth’s weather as the greenhouse effect intensified. While a few researchers considered the possibility of global cooling, the vast majority agreed that rising atmospheric concentrations of CO2 would trigger chaotic weather patterns, with regional and local effects including heatwaves, droughts, and intensified storms. When they pointed out that these phenomena would have negative impacts on humanity, they were ignored, censored, and derided by politicians and media figures.
Now, after a decade of record high temperatures, those dire predictions are coming true. The “alarmists” Dennis Byrne derides include the US Armed Forces, the CIA, and insurance companies all over the world.
Paul Revere was an alarmist, too. If he’d been living in Concord in April, 1775, Mr. Byrne would’ve turned over and gone right back to sleep.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republicans
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 20: Lexicography Edition
The Wisconsin State Journal’s Cynthia Tucker says that “Global warming skeptics rule GOP”:
For multiple days already this summer, the interior of the country has cooked underneath a bowl of hot air. As that heat wave wore on, a freakish storm erupted from Chicago to Washington, D.C., bringing winds that resembled the edge of a hurricane. And in what has become a summer ritual, wildfires are raging not only in the western United States but in parts of the eastern U.S., too.
If global warming is a hoax, it is a strangely powerful one, hoisting global temperatures to record highs, melting the Arctic ice cap, and threatening agriculture and ecosystems across the planet. So how did scientists make that up?
They didn’t, of course, despite the insistence of powerful Republican leaders that your frying lawn is a figment of your imagination. It’s hard not to notice that it’s hotter than it used to be.
This year, indeed, has brought the United States the broad spectrum of weird weather that climate scientists have warned about for years. That includes drought conditions across two-thirds of the country.
“This is what global warming looks like at the regional or personal level. The extra heat increases the odds of worse heat waves, droughts, storms and wildfire. This is certainly what I and many other climate scientists have been warning about,” Jonathan Overpeck, professor of geosciences and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona, told The Associated Press.
Still, of all the debates that rage like wildfires across the political landscape — taxes, health care, immigration — climate change gets precious little attention. Now that Republicans such as Mitt Romney have shifted their stances to line up with hard-core climate change skeptics, Democrats have given up. President Barack Obama hasn’t made it a priority for a long time.
I hate it when words are misused. Don’t you? Sent July 9:
Describing the GOP as being “ruled by global warming skeptics” would be right on target, were it not for one small problem: genuine skeptics rely on evidence; they’re ready to change their minds when the facts demand it. They distrust their own preconceptions and are ready to suspend judgement in order to accumulate and analyze relevant facts. And genuine skeptics always seek to avoid confirmation bias in their research.
Conservative politicians’ approach to climate change, like their approach to every other policy area in modern American life, embodies none of these qualities. Rather, they’re entirely driven by confirmation bias, dismissing any information that threatens their preconceptions. Having decided long ago that climate science was a “liberal” issue, they’re ideologically bound to deny its existence, severity, and causes.
True skepticism demands intellectual discipline and rigor, qualities not found in any contemporary Republican analysis of climate change. Describing Republican true believers as “skeptics” is an undeserved insult to the genuinely skeptical, and an undeserved compliment to cynical and intellectually complacent politicians who wouldn’t recognize intellectual rigor if it slapped them in the face.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots media irresponsibility scientific consensus wildfires
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 19: Strike Anywhere…
The Tehama County Daily News (CA) notes that things are sorta kinda on fire:
LOS ANGELES (MCT) After several years of relatively benign fire seasons, the West is headed into a hot dry summer of potentially ferocious blazes like the ones that have scorched Colorado in recent weeks.
The wildfires that have already destroyed more than 700 homes and outbuildings along Colorado’s Front Range and blackened hundreds of thousands of acres of New Mexico wilderness are not likely to be the season’s last for one simple reason: drought.
“This year, fires are going big,” Tom Harbour, fire and aviation director for the U.S. Forest Service, said last week. “We’ve had some really extraordinary runs … fires that are running 10 miles in lighter fuels.
Fires that are running miles in forested areas.”
A dry La Nina winter and a paltry, quick-melting snowpack in much of the West have set the stage for another incendiary summer, compounding the effects of a long-term drought that has gripped the seven-state Colorado River basin for more than a decade.
“The reason Colorado is burning is they’ve had prolonged drought,” said Bob Keane, a forest service research ecologist based in Montana.
Add the high temperatures and gusting winds that hit the state last week, and you have a recipe for combustion.
Quick and dirty. Sent July 8:
No single event can be unambiguously linked to global climate change, because climate science doesn’t work that way. But any attempt to claim that the wildfires devastating America’s West aren’t connected to Earth’s burgeoning greenhouse effect is statistically absurd.
Climatologists have been predicting for years that the consequences of increased CO2 emissions would include weather that was hotter, weirder, fiercer, and less predictable. And while some of their forecasts were erroneous, most of those mistakes were underestimations of the speed and magnitude of the transformation in our environment.
Despite an ongoing campaign of climate-change denial, the atmosphere is still getting hotter. We’d mock any Colorado residents who refuse to heed the gathering flames — why, then, are climatologists and environmentalists whose decades of predictions on climate change have been overwhelmingly vindicated still treated with derision by the petroleum-funded professionals in our politics and media?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 18: If You’ll Say “You Told Me So,” I Won’t Say “I Told You So”
The Merriville (IN) Post-Times runs an AP story on the current heatwave:
Horrendous wildfires. Oppressive heat waves. Devastating droughts. Flooding from giant deluges. And a powerful freak wind storm called a derecho.
These are the kinds of extremes experts have predicted will come with climate change, although it’s far too early to say that is the cause. Nor will they say global warming is the reason 3,215 daily high temperature records were set in the month of June.
Scientifically linking individual weather events to climate change takes intensive study, complicated mathematics, computer models and time. Sometimes it isn’t caused by global warming. Weather is always variable; freak things happen.
And this weather has been local. Europe, Asia and Africa aren’t having similar disasters now, although they’ve had their own extreme events in recent years.
But since at least 1988, climate scientists have warned that climate change would bring, in general, increased heat waves, more droughts, more sudden downpours, more widespread wildfires and worsening storms. In the United States, those extremes are happening here and now.
More pounding on the denialists. Sent July 7:
Even as the American Midwest sizzled under a heatwave of staggering proportions, climate-change denialists kept on sounding their message of complacency and inaction. Everything’s fine, they say. The planet’s actually getting cooler. If Earth’s atmosphere is heating up, it’s just sunspots, or “natural cycles.” Anyway, humans aren’t to blame. The climate has always changed. If humans are involved, it’s too expensive to do anything about it. Al Gore has a big house. And on and on.
When politicians and media figures mock “climate alarmists,” it is part of their pathetic attempt to rationalize an unsustainable status quo — one which now promises massive crop failures, droughts and wildfires throughout America.
We owe our nation’s existence to those who woke to the call of a midnight rider bringing the news that the British were coming. Climate scientists are the Paul Reveres of the present day. Will we finally heed their warnings?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots media irresponsibility scientific consensus
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Year 7, Month 7, Day 17: DFH! NIMBY?
The Washington Post acknowledges the hippies:
Wildfires? Record thunderstorms? Blast furnace heat? An earthquake, even?
At least that’s what one group of folks is thinking, even if they don’t voice it quite so crassly.
“We don’t want to do it in an I-told-you-so kind of way,” demurs John Topping, who is the president of the Washington-based Climate Institute.
But see, people! This is what all the global-warming Paul Reveres have been shouting about.
Now some are finally paying attention, at least in the Washington region.
“Granted, we’ve only lived in the area for 25 years,” one reader wrote to me. “But the first 15 left an impression that this was not one of Dante’s circles. The last ten: approaching inner circle quickly.”
Apparently, a tree falling on a house hits much closer to home than a melting ice cap.
Because it will be sooooo excellent to be smug while we circle the bowl on our way to the Venus effect. Sent July 6:
For decades, climatologists warned us that increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases would trigger chaotic and destructive weather. We’ve were warned of rising temperatures and rising seas, of droughts, invasive species, wildfires, tropical storms — all consequences of global climate change.
And for decades our media and politics have ignored and derided those scientific specialists and their findings. Whether it’s tinfoil-hatted conspiracy theorists convinced that Al Gore is out to confiscate their SUVs, petroleum-backed politicians protecting their puppetmasters, or ordinary citizens with more immediate concerns, the unavoidable fact is that Americans have too long assumed that climate change is a problem for other people, other places, other times.
No more. While we’ll always pay more attention to what’s happening in our own backyards, there is no escaping that this is a crisis of planetary scope and millennial span. Earth is the new neighborhood, and a century is the new now.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 16: I Do Not Think About Things I Do Not Think About.
The Washington Post notes that people don’t seem to care all that much:
Climate change no longer ranks first on the list of what Americans see as the world’s biggest environmental problem, according to a new Washington Post-Stanford University poll.
Just 18 percent of those polled name it as their top environmental concern. That compares with 33 percent who said so in 2007, amid publicity about a major U.N. climate report and Al Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary about global warming. Today, 29 percent identify water and air pollution as the world’s most pressing environmental issue.
Still, Americans continue to see climate change as a threat, caused in part by human activity, and they think government and businesses should do more to address it. Nearly three-quarters say the Earth is warming, and just as many say they believe that temperatures will continue to rise if nothing is done, according to the poll.
The findings, along with follow-up interviews with some respondents, indicate that Washington’s decision to shelve action on climate policy means that the issue has receded — even though many people link recent dramatic weather events to global warming. And they may help explain why elected officials feel little pressure to impose curbs on greenhouse gas emissions.
“I really don’t give it a thought,” said Wendy Stewart, a 46-year-old bookkeeper in New York. Although she thinks warmer winters and summers are signs of climate change, she has noticed that political leaders don’t bring up the subject. “I’ve never heard them speak on global warming,” she said. “I’ve never heard them elaborate on it.”
But noticing the media’s irresponsible coverage of this issue is terribly uncivil. Can’t have that, now, can we? Sent July 5:
If climate change has lost its first-place position among Americans’ environmental worries, that’s because politicians and media figures would rather ignore any problem that can’t be resolved within an election cycle or two. After all, since rising temperatures are probably irreversible at this point, we’re probably better off focusing on problems we know we can fix, like air and water pollution. No politician craves electoral martyrdom, even in the service of a noble cause.
The problem with this attitude, of course, is that the unfolding disaster of global warming remains the preeminent environmental concern of our century. Colorado’s metastasizing wildfires and the country-wide heat wave are just two symptoms of a crisis that is planetary in scope and multi-generational in timespan — something which requires political will and genuine leadership, rather than the evasions and platitudes which have persuaded millions of Americans that there’s really nothing much to worry about.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility denialists
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 15: Time For A Declaration of Independence?
The Toledo (OH) Blade is shrill:
Searing heat, violent thunderstorms, wildfires, smog, power blackouts, crop losses. These things aren’t new, yet their recent magnitude raises new questions about human influence on climate.
Climate change is real, despite the stubbornness of a denial movement that shrugs off both the problem and the science that documents it. Although such change is partially inevitable, the question of human influence and how to mitigate it demands a central role in this year’s political debate.
Recent heat waves, in Ohio and Michigan and elsewhere, point to greater warming of the Earth. As this part of the country basked in an unusually warm March, northern Michigan’s cherry crop was devastated by early growth followed by frost. Now comes word that 90 percent of that state’s apple crop is destroyed.
Problems associated with climate change are not limited to extreme events. There are more subtle signs. Growth of toxic algae begins earlier, stays later, and becomes more dominant in the western Lake Erie region.
An additional month of dredging is scheduled for the second straight year by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, to keep the Toledo shipping channel navigable despite excessive silt that enters waterways after storms.
Ozone-induced smog, allergies, and diseases transmitted by mosquitoes also drive up costs. Much of northwest Ohio remains abnormally dry or in a drought, even after hail and heavy thunderstorms swept across the region this week.
Lobbyists have convinced lawmakers — at least, those who want to be convinced — that much of the evidence of man-made climate change is merely anecdotal. They have blocked cap-and-trade legislation that would provide incentives to industry to reduce emissions related to warming.
Always good to quote Upton Sinclair. Sent July 4:
Almost a century ago, Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” His words perfectly describe the politicians who, bankrolled by powerful corporate interests, have been consistently obstructing our progress towards rational energy and environmental policies.
Coal, oil and gas are the energy sources of the past — privileged by tradition and by a false pricing system that ignores externalities: pollution cleanup, health impacts, resource wars, and global climate change. Even if the deniers were right, getting our country onto renewables is the right thing to do, for countless reasons.
But the deniers are wrong, as this incendiary summer confirms to all but the most avariciously self-deluding. It’s time for our politicians to start refusing paychecks from those who would let us burn rather than surrender even the tiniest fraction of their astronomical profit margins.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: alarmism denialists idiots media irresponsibility wildfires
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 14: Liberals Have A Reality-Bias…
The Portland (ME) Press-Herald runs a WaPo article on climate change and the hell-on-earth that is Colorado:
WASHINGTON — Snow hardly fell during winter in snowy Colorado. On top of that, the state’s soaking spring rains did not come. So it was no wonder that normally emerald landscapes were parched as summer approached, tan as a pair of worn khakis.
All the earth needed was a spark.
Colorado and U.S. Forest Service firefighters are battling the state’s most destructive wildfires ever. Lightning and suspected arson ignited them four weeks ago, but scientists and federal officials say the table was set by a culprit that will probably contribute to bigger and more frequent wildfires for years to come: climate change.
In the past two years, record-breaking wildfires have burned in the West — New Mexico experienced its worst-ever wildfire, Arizona suffered its largest burn and Texas last year fought the most fires in recorded history. From Mississippi to the Ohio Valley, temperatures are topping record highs and the land is thirsty.
“We’ve had record fires in 10 states in the last decade, most of them in the West,” said U.S. Agriculture Undersecretary Harris Sherman, who oversees the U.S. Forest Service.
A revision and extension of the letter from two days ago. Sent July 3:
Not too long ago, any public figure who pointed out that a runaway greenhouse effect would have significant negative consequences for humanity could look forward to insults and mockery from conservatives. Anyone who suggested that it would probably be a good idea to stop pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere would be called a “climate alarmist,” an “environazi,” or a “watermelon” (green on the outside, red on the inside — get it?).
The name-calling’s still going on, but some of the climate-change denialists are beginning to wake up. Even Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson publicly acknowledged the fact of human-caused global warming in a recent speech, although his assertion that humanity will “adapt” blithely glosses over the enormous human cost involved. More generally, the fact that America is undergoing a nationwide heat wave has rendered the denialist position harder to sustain.
More than three decades ago, climatologists started predicting that global warming would bring about this type of erratic and unpredictable weather, but politicians and the media have consistently ignored or derided their emergency signals. Such dismissals can now be understood as a grave abdication of the responsibilities of leadership.
“Alarmism” is just a sensible response to an alarming situation; as planetary temperatures rise and smoke billows above a burning Colorado, it’s obvious and inescapable: global climate change is as alarming as it gets.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialism media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 13: Zippadee Doo Dah, Zippadee Day!
The New York Times fails at journamalism:
HILL CITY, Kan. — This town on the parched plains, best known for its bountiful pheasant hunting and museum of oil history, recently earned a new, if unwelcome, distinction — the center of America’s summer inferno.
For five days last week, a brutal heat wave here crested at 115 degrees. Crops wilted. Streets emptied. Farmers fainted in the fields. Air-conditioners gave up. Children even temporarily abandoned the municipal swimming pool. Hill City was, for a spell, in the ranks of the hottest spots in the country.
“Hell, it’s the hottest place on earth,” Allen Trexler, an 81-year-old farmer who introduced himself as Old Man Trexler. He spoke while standing in the shade of a tree on Saturday morning, the temperature already sneaking toward 100.
Gotta love Old Man Trexler. Sent July 2:
When Kansas is reeling from a blistering heat wave, it’s a human interest story, complete with a picturesque old gentleman standing in the shade of a tree. When several states are hammered with extreme high temperatures, it’s a genuine emergency.
And when the whole country is experiencing either higher temperatures or extreme weather (like the massive thunderstorms that left millions of people without electricity in Virginia and Washington, D.C.), and hundreds of nations all over the globe are going through the same kinds of troubles, what is it then?
It’s a symptom of global warming — confirming predictions made as far back as the 1970s that an accelerating greenhouse effect would lead both to higher temperatures and weirder, uglier weather.
And what’s a good way to describe a feature article on Kansas’ disastrous weather that never once mentions planetary climate change?
“Irresponsible journalism” springs to mind.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialism invasive species media irresponsibility pine beetles Republicans rising sea levels
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 12: The Snooze Button Lasts For Twenty Thousand Years
The local “Metro-West” paper runs a piece by Rick Holmes, who’s clearly just another DFH:
Mountain pine beetles are tiny critters, the size of a grain of rice. They bore under the bark of Western pine trees, infecting them with a fatal fungus that turns their trunks blue, dries their needles to a rusty red, and then they fall.
Cold winters kill off the beetle larvae and keep populations in check, but over the last 20 years, cold winters have become fewer and farther between. The beetles have taken full advantage of changes in the climate. They are thriving at higher altitudes and have expanded their range. They now reproduce twice a year instead of once.
In the last few years, the beetles have ravaged Rocky Mountain forests from upper Canada to New Mexico. The blight has deadened 3.3 million acres of forest in Colorado alone.
A long-running drought has left those dead pines extra crispy, and Colorado has been seeing record heat. Denver hit 105 degrees this week, and Colorado Springs has had a string of 100 degree days.
Add a spark and what to you get? Colorado is in flames. The Waldo Canyon fire near Colorado Springs, having burned thousands of acres and destroyed hundreds of homes, is the most destructive fire in state history. It broke the record set the week before by the High Park fire outside Fort Collins.
It’s still early in the wildfire season, but everything seems to be coming early this year. Hurricane season is young, but we’re already up to E for named storms. It was a warm winter here in New England as well, and the flowers seem to be blooming about three weeks ahead of schedule.
Watch the mockery begin! Sent July 1:
For a long time, the word “alarmist” appeared regularly in the arsenal of right-wing pejoratives. Anyone pointing out some of the consequences of a runaway greenhouse effect would be labeled a “climate alarmist” and mocked for presumed fealty to Al Gore (or, in Rush Limbaugh’s vernacular, “algore”). Watch what happens to Rick Holmes, who has the temerity to continue talking about the slow-motion emergency that is global climate change.
Climate scientists are the diagnostic physicians of our planet, and their increasingly urgent emergency signals have been ignored for decades by politicians and the media. Fortunately, more Americans are gradually accepting reality (even Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson, who acknowledged climate change recently while blithely asserting that humanity will “adapt” to its new environment).
As the world sets high-temperature records, as Colorado burns, and the seas rise far faster than experts had anticipated, “climate alarmism” is looking increasingly like simple common sense.
Warren Senders